Why Magento is a terrible eCommerce Platform for SMBs

Why Magento is a terrible eCommerce Platform for SMBs

I personally think Magento sucks! That is of course my own personal opinion and endless amounts of people would disagree with me, but a huge amount of people will agree with me, that Magento Sucks!

If you’re looking at using Magento or recommending it to your client you should read the info below, it might save you a headache.

Generally speaking for nearly everyone who’s not at over £2 million pounds a year with online turnover and SMBs Magento is an absolute utter waste of time. Below I’m refering to Magento version 2.1.2, the latest at the time of posting.

1) It’s not small, it’s very heavy with a lot of features very few will ever use, it’s also nearly 44k files (235MB) big (yikes) – which when you compare it to the 2,443 files OpenCart uses (30.2MB) its obscene. If anyone at Magento reads this and they have half a brain, HEY! WAKEUP! You should release a few different versions, even for the free option.

2) It’s difficult to setup, configure and host. Because of it’s vast file base, some hosts limit at 30 – 100k files. Since the files alone limit your hosts, for those “Magento” specific hosts that limit to 100k you’re going to struggle with the amount of products you can have. Also since it’s so beefy it really wants 4GB of RAM minimum.

Ideally you will host Magento on a Dual CPU + VPS with a good 4GB of RAM+. Busy shops or multistie will soon see the RAM requirement fly up. Once you’ve had the specs though, you need the server environment, and Magento needs new versions of PHP and MySQL, giving you a super headaches. A standard install with Plesk for example will leave you unable to run Magento 2. You will have to manually update the core PHP and MySQL Version and then rebind everything back to plesk.

Once that’s up and running you’ll have to edit the htaccess yourself if you’re using Multisite because it seems regardless of how “clever” and awesome Magento2 is, it still can’t edit a htaccess file. Once you’ve done that you’ll have the horrible task of adding CRON jobs, not so hard, but they need to run on a specific version of PHP, anyway once they’re set that’s not it! Because on 2 different hosts AND on a VPS I configured from scratch the CRON jobs simply stopped working, new products being added wouldn’t show, meaning I added another CRON to force update of products.

Caching of pages is utter aids, it clears itself some times, other times not.

3) Owners will have a nightmare editing the homepage. It’s true, it’s about as least user friendly as possible. There is no easy quick blocks to add to view stuff on the home page. There’s no “Latest Products”, there’s just “NEW Products” Annd… that’s another problem you have to manually select products as “New” via a date range per product, if you get lazy or you’re busy you’ll suddenly notice that date range has expired and your widget is empty. The “Documents” or pages are not filtered per store either, so multisite headaches continue.

4) Designers and Developers hate it. Version 1 was literally coded in a few weeks. It’s a total shitstorm of a mess, Version 2 has over 44k files, the folder structure is like some sort of krypton factor mindfuck that will have you bashing your face on the keyboard. Designing Magento is supposedly easy, however if you ever venture to the “off the shelf” theme zone then beware, lots of theme makers force you to use their SQL, meaning that unless you’re starting from scratch the theme is utterly fucking useless.

5) Very costly to maintain. Because there’s so much hate around it, and it’s a total nightmare it comes with a premium. Many “Premium” skins/themes have “addons” and don’t include the nice navigation or other features and some plugins are very expensive. It’s classed as a “Professional” ecommerce solution and as such you’re raped constantly for it. Buying cheap labour from places like Upwork generally end up costing you more in the long run since their “ENGRISH” is awful or they have fuck all of a clue what they’re on about.

Also because of the server requirement, hardware wise, expect to be paying for a premium VPS or a Dedicated Server, thus costing your £25-250 a month!

I couldn’t agree with you more every word you have written is 100000% true.

I thought I had issues with Prestashop that drove me mad but trying to get then keep a magento 2 store working on a decent vps for the last 3 months has literally driven me mad. You do all the the right things, and as Adam says the next day everything has changed. I had auto back ups set to run, when it died again i went to the back office to go back to a working version and they had ALL Gone. One day it all works, the next day various bits of the front or back office don’t. The cache works sometimes then another time you wait 30 seconds for a product to load. No ‘modules’ ever self install ever. The ongoing stupidity of the file permissions saga where randomly they just changed and nothing works and you have to ssh in and update them all again, the file owner ship issues. The manual tasks that you have to run via ssh to keep the store working is ridiculous and never ending. The crons as above, are a joke in 2017.

Then magento back office keeps telling you to udpate the store as there seems to be ‘critical safety’ issues daily – the update process from the back office never works. The auto updater that they added for normal people to use, comes back with 15 failures on your server setup, php errors – when NOTHING has changed since the same checks were done by the auto installer when it installed a few weeks before, so then you try and do a manual update which again leaves the theme not working, and if you are lucky after 30 hours you might get it running again.

I did battle with it for 3 months and got a store working for maybe 5 days in between disasters. The last disaster was my own fault entirely I did the stupid thing of uploading about 30 new products images and expecting them to work …….. All the images on the whole site then stopped loading no products then had working images. I run out of time or inclination to even care why adding 12 new products and images could cause in effect another total failure on the store.

It is the the worst bit of software I have ever ever used in my entire life.

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